Chrononautic Log

June 30, 2003

I was never a big John Cougar Mellencamp fan back in the day, and I’m not likely to become one now — when I get nostalgic for The Early 80s I Never Had, I’m more likely to listen to Elvis Costello, or Art of Noise, or the Go-Betweens, or something. If I was going to start listening to Mellencamp I’d have to work my way up through Creedence and Bruce Springsteen first.

But regardless, I like quite a lot of what he has to say in this interview with Salon. For instance:

You’ve always been pretty upfront about the fact that you were playing this game to be on Top-40 radio, to have hits. Meaning if you're going to put time into a project, you might as well have as many people hear it as possible.

You’re right. I always said there’s no reason to make these records if nobody’s going to hear them. What’s the point, unless you can do something positive with the song, or entertain people? These things are too hard to make, they take too long, they cost too much money and there’s no reason to make them unless the record company is going to support you and try to sell the fucking thing.

Arguably he contradicts himself a little later in the interview, but still — file off the serial numbers, and he could be talking about any art form you like, from architecture to winemaking. That’s a pretty serviceable credo for any of them.

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June 29, 2003

Two or three links away from the train wreck going on in Electrolite’s comments section, we find this amusing transcript from The O’Reilly Factor or whatever it’s called. A sample:

O’REILLY: Would you be in favor of the government investigating this at all? Would you be in favor of that?

HIGGINS: I’m in favor of the government investigating anything that it sees fit to investigate. I like government investigations for the most part.

O’REILLY: Right. Well, you are one of the few who does, but see I’m a little bit worried. . .

HIGGINS: You are a Whitewater fan. You liked that.

It’s nice to see that there are still some people out there who can think on their feet instead of just reading from the teleprompter.

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June 28, 2003

I’ve been annoyed with myself for some time because I still haven’t bothered to read Drexler, let alone do anything to figure out how close we really are to being able to dissolve the world into grey goo.

While trying to find this Economist piece on “Quasam” (an apparently miraculous new material apparently made from unrolled carbon nanotubes and predicted, at least by the people who hold the patents, to be bigger than plastics), I instead ran across this: Trends in Nanotechnology Weekly. A sample:

Climbing the walls again

Yes, it’s the return of the gecko story. We can happily report that a UK-based team at Manchester University has demonstrated a material where each square centimetre contains 100 million hairs. The combined effect of the weak van der Waals forces exerted by each square centimetre is sufficient to support a kilogram. For a slightly more in-depth look and a picture of Spiderman hanging from the ceiling, see here.

TNTW looks like a nice roundup, and hopefully will get me some ways toward catching up with the state of the art myself, instead of making Greg Bear and Neal Stephenson and Linda Nagata and Walter Jon Williams do all my research for me.

Plus, it’s British.

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June 27, 2003

Okay, so, like, my real question about this otherwise uninteresting article is: I guess I can kind of understand why the cold-blooded Scandinavians up here in Seattle do these crazy things . . . But why the hell would anyone in Los Angeles ever want to eat at a Taco Bell?

(I mean, okay, I know Taco Bell was founded in SoCal. But still. My mole-deprived soul is in torment.)

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June 26, 2003

I was dead wrong to give up on Charles Coleman Finlay’s “The Political Officer”. I admit it. Never again.

Summer solstice seems a less inappropriate time for New Year’s resolutions than some, so here’s one: To have at least as much patience with what I read as I would like others to have with what I write.

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June 23, 2003

So I happen to notice this old news over at Locus:

Foolish me, I thought they meant Bill Burroughs. Damn, what a world that would have been.

06.03

Science Fiction Hall of Fame Inductees: Tucker, Wilhelm, Knight, Burroughs

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Rob “aphrael” West has switched over to Moveable Type and moved Bound in a Nutshell to a new URL.

The most important change, of course, is that being as it’s MT, the new, improved Bound supports comments. Go bug him.

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June 20, 2003

An unrelated but pertinent observation from Will Shetterly:

The older I get, the more I suspect that many devout people understand that they’re engaged in symbolic discourse. They just don’t have the terminology to express this in a way that says something is truer for being symbolic than it would be for being literal.

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June 19, 2003

9-year-old girl marries dog in India

[AP] — ...The girl, Karnamoni Handsa, had to be married quickly to break an evil spell, according to the beliefs of her Santhal tribe in the remote village of Khanyan, the Hindustan Times said. ... Other news media also reported on the ritual, which does not interfere with the girl’s life. She suffers no stigma and is free to marry later. She doesn’t even need to divorce the dog.

The lesson, of course, is not that them foreigners is weirdos, but that the English language is sorely lacking in words to describe a culture with a richer world of relationships and rituals than we in the west end of Eurasia are used to.

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June 18, 2003

This abbrieviated script captures what’s wrong with the film almost as well as Will Shetterly did, and it’s funnier.

GLORIA FOSTER

Hello Keanu. My dialogue this time around isn’t anywhere near as well written as the last time we talked, so let me get to the chase. I’m a program, all of your decisions have already been made, Trinity is going to die, and you need to find Randall Duk Kim. Gotta run!

KEANU REEVES

Got it. Hey, have you seen that spoon-bending kid from before? There haven’t been any cool quotable phrases in this movie and I think he could help.

GLORIA shakes her head and leaves.

HUGO WEAVING

Mr. Anderson.

KEANU REEVES

That’s good, but it really came from the first movie. Got anything else?

There’s plenty more where that came from.

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June 17, 2003

Salon is running a brilliant interview with music executive Danny Goldberg that is the most insightful single thing I’ve read on what’s gone wrong with the Democratic party. Some excerpts:

It’s on cultural issues where the left has been most successful with the public, and on economic issues where they've had the biggest struggle, where they've lost. Yet a lot of people in the political world think the exact opposite. They delude themselves into thinking that their economic ideas and policy ideas are really popular and these social issues are dragging them down. But the facts are the opposite.

You have a political consultant culture that produces candidates like Al Gore, who thinks that on a nationally televised debate at the peak of the election season he should talk about the “lockbox” or “Dingell-Norwood,” incomprehensible insider jargon. I didn’t know what he was talking about, and I read the New York Times every day. And then there are people like Joe Lieberman, who feel the way to win swing voters is to attack popular culture. As if popular culture had been created by Martians, instead of by the actual people in the country.

I don’t know why they can’t talk about a moral conception of politics. I do think younger people want an idealistic framework for their politics, and the conservatives have been really good at creating an idealistic concept behind everything they do. I don’t agree with any of it, but they have a philosophy you can understand. Even people who don’t benefit from a tax cut feel that there’s a moral concept behind the idea of what taxes should be, and that’s why they support it. It’s not that they’re stupid. They buy into a moral philosophy that the conservatives express. Our guys don't express a moral philosophy.

I’m a little disappointed in people from my generation, the baby boomers, at least when it comes to electoral politics and public interest groups. We were so anxious to get into the game and get power and get our voices heard. The Gores, the Liebermans, these are people of my generation, the people running the public interest groups. So many times I’ll run into political people my age and they’ll say, “Oh, isn't music terrible?” And I say, “I don't think so.” Is music not as good as it was when we were young? Well, we're not the same people we were when we were young. Nothing is going to touch me the way Bob Dylan’s “Blonde on Blonde” touched me then. But today, to my daughter, Pink is somebody she's going to remember 30 years from now. Kids who like the White Stripes, or like Jay-Z or Eminem, these are artists who are touching them in a similar way. They’re 16 and we’re not.

I’m 30, and I’ve already figured that out. Baby Boomers have no excuse. But why is this more than a personal problem? Why is it a problem for the Democratic party? Here’s why:

To me, it’s amazing that no one has looked back on that election in the political world: There was this drop in young support for the Democrats, it was dramatic. Clinton beat Bush Sr. by 12 points among the 18 to 24’s in 1992. He beat Dole by 19 points among 18-to-24’s in ‘96. In 2000, Gore was only able to tie Bush in that group. A 19-point drop! There were 9 million people in the 18-to-24-year-old group, so that's a couple million votes, at least. That obviously would have swung New Hampshire, it would have swung Missouri. I think it would have swung Florida, although I acknowledge that Lieberman picked up some Jewish votes in Florida. But he cost them much more than he got them. I mean, it wasn’t only Lieberman. But he orchestrated Senate hearings in September, six weeks before the election, to bash culture. Then they wonder why Ralph Nader did so well among young people. I mean, that’s not the only reason why, but it certainly didn’t help.

Normally I wouldn’t post this many excerpts, but it’s just too good. Go read the rest of it.

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June 13, 2003

If Gulf War I was the cable television war, Gulf War II is the GPS and satellite phone war.

Washington Post reporter Barton Gellman, in a chat on the Post site:

I went to the Baghdad Nuclear Research Facility in Tuweitha with a team of genuine nuclear experts. But they were not experts on Iraq’s nuclear history, and they knew very little about the site. The leader found a bunch of radioactive drums and didn’t expect them there. I took my pocket GPS, obtained the lat/long coordinates, called an inspector with long experience at the site, told him what I was seeing and the coordinates, and he said: That’s the permanent nuclear waste storage facility, under IAEA monitoring, Building 55. It’s not the team leader’s fault he didn't know that, but it's somebody’s fault.

Never mind the politics; that’s just a very sweet, very appropriate, very casual use of technology.

It used to be that an easy way for an author (or screenwriter) to get a character into a jam was to get that character lost; GPS is making that harder and harder to justify, not only in science fiction (which already doesn’t have much of an excuse) but in the mainstream as well.

Now combine that with cheap cell and satellite phones — especially if those phones have Internet access — and now your protagonist not only has no excuse to be lost, but no excuse to be ignorant either; at least, not ignorant of anything that’s either public knowledge, or known to some other character your protagonist can call — or who can call your protagonist. (The Matrix is the only recent work I can think of that’s used this to its full extent — though, admittedly, making a call from virtual reality to reality is a bit of a special case.)

I expect to see a rash of idiot plots in which the characters “somehow” manage to leave their GPS receivers, cell phones, and whatnot in their other pairs of pants. But readers and moviegoers are only going to put up with that for so long, and then authors and screenwriters are going to have to start working harder.

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June 12, 2003

This week marks the anniversary of the publication of Greg van Eekhout’s fine story “Show and Tell” at Strange Horizons. Let’s have a big flutter of the head-noodles for Greg.

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June 11, 2003

And then John Kessel nails it:

These new writers act as if there aren’t any barriers that are worth taking notice of. They blithely ignore what John W. Campbell or Algis Budrys or Gardner Dozois or Bruce Sterling have propounded as “essential” to genre work.

This may be because they don’t KNOW what these historical figures said about these issues, or it may be that they just don’t care. But it is obvious that they are not giving readers looking for that good old fashiond sf (of whatever vintage — 1935, 1945, 1955, 1965, or 1985) what they come to sf looking for.

That is because (and David [Truesdale], especially, I ask that you pay attention here) THEY ARE NOT WRITING GENRE SF OR FANTASY. THEY DON’T CARE ABOUT GENRE SF OR FANTASY. THEY DON’T CARE about the kind of content debates that raged in the pages of the Analog letter column in 1970, or what Bruce Sterling propounded in Cheap Truth in 1985 (and yes, David, the Cyberpunks, at least Sterling’s version of them, had a definite agenda).

Except, of course, that we are reading the debate raging in the pages of Tangent Online’s “letter column.”

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June 10, 2003

Greg dropped me a note pointing out an excellent post by Steve Carper over in the Tangent Online sff.net newsgroup. It’s an excellent capsule treatment of the “What is science fiction?” question, with an eye toward what it used to be and what it’s becoming. He nails the Golden Age perfectly:

I’ve tried reading some famous sf books of the 50s recently, and I've been appalled at just how awful, how limited, how small, how badly written they were. Their worldviews were the constricted worldviews of the 1950s. Even Bradbury, with his beautiful prose and imagery, starts off The Martian Chronicles with a story about a Martian woman whose husband makes all the decisions for her. And when you get to a Heinlein novel like The Door Into Summer, the portrayals of females make you want to hose yourself off after reading.

No kidding. I went through this a couple of years ago when I picked up a Gollancz edition of the collected stories of Walter Miller — I was looking for the transcendence of A Canticle For Liebowitz and instead I got a thick packet of run-of-the-mill stories about heroic engineers and self-sacrificing space colonists. As for Bradbury, I still love The Martian Chronicles, but I read them the same nostalgic way I read Dandelion Wine, as a product of a vanished idyllic era. (I’m not going to talk about Heinlein without drinking first.) We don’t need more stories like the ones written in the middle of last century; I’m not even sure we need stories that do the same thing for our time that those stories did for theirs.

And in asking what we do need, Mr. Carper also nails a problem that I’ve been struggling with in my own writing:

Nanotechnology leads to a world that is not human. So does genetic engineering. So does artificial intelligence. So does virtual reality. So does consensus cyberspace. Every individual technological marvel we create leads to a world in which we are obsolete. Mix them all together and you get a future in which simple is a word left to historical dictionaries, a world too complex to be envisioned, let alone written, let alone possible to empathize with.

There are a handful of writers who have been able envision and write those posthuman futures in an empathetic way, but only a handful, and from a burst of early extrapolative exuberance most of them have taken to writing about futures, or even presents, much closer to home.

Mr. Carper goes on:

Why are writers turning to people as their main subjects? Because that's what writers — good writers — write about. Why is fantasy overtaking sf as the leading genre? Because fantasy points to the past and the present, where people live. Why is it harder to find exciting stories about the technological future? Because technology is not inherently exciting: only its effect on people is.

That really is the trick, isn’t it?

Though I admit I don’t read as much new stuff these days as I probably should, I’m not actually sure when I last read a science fiction story that really said something new and startling about the impact of some technology on the human condition. Ted Chiang’s “Liking What You See”, maybe. If I wasn’t such a lazy bastard, Oliver Sacks is where I’d be looking for new frontiers.

I am sure I haven’t written a story like that, and that I don’t have any in the pipeline.

But in a minute I’m going to start wondering if I’m a fraud. Stop reading this and go read the post.

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From the Camels and Needles Department:

[Alabama] Governor Riley has stunned many of his conservative supporters, and enraged the state's powerful farm and timber lobbies, by pushing a tax reform plan through the Alabama Legislature that shifts a significant amount of the state's tax burden from the poor to wealthy individuals and corporations. And he has framed the issue in starkly moral terms, arguing that the current Alabama tax system violates biblical teachings because Christians are prohibited from oppressing the poor.

...

The Christian Coalition of Alabama has not yet taken a position on the September vote, but it has been speaking out against the plan’s tax increases. In an interview yesterday, John Giles, the group’s president, had trouble pointing to a biblical passage that directly supported his opposition to new taxes, but he referred to Jesus’ statement about rendering unto Caesar what is Caesar’s. The key question, he argued, is, “How much is Caesar’s?”

As the Bush administration and the religious right fight to put theology more squarely into public policy discussions, they are going to have to be ready for arguments like the ones coming out of Alabama. Many theologians argue that it is far easier to find support in the Bible for policies that help the poor than for, say, a cut in the dividend tax.

—— Adam Cohen, “What Would Jesus Do? Sock It to Alabama’s Corporate Landowners”, New York Times

No kidding. It’s stories like this that make me think how nice it would be if America actually had ad-hoc coalitions instead of political parties, the way George Washington envisioned it.

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June 9, 2003

Okay, I’m all for reclaiming and defusing offensive epithets — black power, grrl power, queer pride, all of it.

But today when I went to get my morning coffee there was a sheriff’s deputy in the coffee shop wearing a navy-blue ball cap embroidered with the words:

(I wonder what the LEIU protestors would’ve had to say. Come to think of it, maybe that’s where he got the hat.)

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June 6, 2003

Jed Hartman has an editorial over at Strange Horizons called “The Future of Sex”, on sexual relationships in future human (and posthuman) societies in SF, and the lack of diversity thereof. I probably should be posting this over in the SH forum instead, but I didn’t get around to reading Jed’s editorial until this morning, and now it’s awfully crowded over there. (Any thoughts about making the SH forums threaded, by the way, Jed?)

Part of the problem, I think, is that it’s extremely difficult to create a believably complex alternative sexuality. Too often the writer can only manage to come up with one, more monolithic than heterosexual monogamy has ever been, and the result is either dystopia or a utopia verging on wish-fulfillment. To evoke a universe of diverse sexual alternatives is even more difficult, particularly in a short work, particularly if the work is supposed to be about something else entirely. Make a character’s relationship — but not the type of relationship — an important facet of the story and the problem grows exponentially.

Take a story like Gibson and Swanwick’s “Dogfight”, which turns on what is essentially, structurally, romantic betrayal and rape. Make Deke a bisexual hermaphrodite and Nance a lesbian. Now does Deke still betray Nance because s/he’s a lowlife fuck, or because of the fundamental instability of a relationship between two people whose desires are at right angles to one another and who can never actually touch? A worldly and open-minded reader may conclude that it’s still because Deke is a weak-willed junkie hustler, but a lot of readers will be distracted by the exotic sexuality. (Not that such a reading wouldn’t be interesting, but I’m not convinced that it would make the story more powerful.)

For a concrete example, take Charles Stross’ “Lobsters”. I’ve talked to more than one person who hasn’t been able to see past the S&M to the essentially political humor of Pamela’s expropriation of Manfred’s genetic material — though I admit the sex adds a dimension to the story that a simple tissue sample, for instance, would lack.

There was a phase SF went through in the 70s and 80s where experimenting with sexual relationships, sometimes to an almost baroque extent, was practically de rigeur — often within a fairly unimaginative male-dominated heterosexual context, true, but there was a point where polyamory and kinky human/alien sex were almost as much a genre trope as the ubiquitous household cleaning robot.

Like that robot, you’d find them in stories that were really about something else entirely — used merely for false exoticism, to punch up the “future-ness” of an otherwise very contemporary civilization. Benford’s In the Ocean of Night is a good example — you get the feeling the stuff about the collapse of Nigel Walmsley’s triad relationship was put in as filler to pad a fix-up of several short stories out to novel length. (And even at that it’s not enough, as he has to throw in a new worldwide religious cult as well.)

If it wasn’t false exoticism, it was gratuitous pornography, and aimed generally at a very conventional heterosexual male libido — the “pudendolls” that turned up in one of Aldiss’ Helliconia books, for instance, or the surprisingly large subset of the stories in Medea: Harlan’s World that turned out to be about women having sex with (possibly nonsentient) living hot-air balloons.

I don’t think it’s a coincidence that this seemed to die off about the same time that AIDS, a social-conservative backlash, and maybe even the coming of age of a second generation of career women (as one of my Santa Cruz professors was fond of putting it, “All the so-called ‘sexual revolution’ accomplished was to make women more sexually available to men”) took the edge off the Swinging Seventies. Nor, given that decade’s renewed respectability, would I be surprised to see it make a comeback in SF over the next few years — SF lagging, as usual, a few years behind social change in society at large.

I admit I’ve got my own hangups. I put down Swanwick’s Jack Faust, for instance, when it stopped being about technological and social change and started being about fucking. But for my part, as both a reader and a writer, having read enough of this done badly back in the day, I feel like I’ve been there and done that.

To be honest, I’m tired of false exoticism of all kinds; it’s one thing to weave your exoticism in deftly to create an exotic texture, but against a cozier and more conventional background, it sticks out — the well-worn example of Heinlein’s “the door dilated” notwithstanding — like a sore pseudopod. I’d rather read a powerful story that’s conservative in its choice of characters and props, than a story weakened by a token nod to false diversity.

That said, I’m all in favor of increasing all kinds of diversity in SF characters’ lives. But like everything else in writing it’s something a writer has to develop an ear for.

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June 4, 2003

From the Abuse Your Readers By Making Use Of Your Blog As A Commonplace Book Department:

TOUCHSTONE: Therefore, you clown, abandon, — which is in the vulgar, leave, — the society, — which in the boorish is, company, — of this female, — which in the common is, woman; which together is, abandon the society of this female, or, clown, thou perishest; or, to thy better understanding, diest; or, to wit, I kill thee, make thee away, translate thy life into death, thy liberty into bondage. I will deal in poison with thee, or in bastinado, or in steel; I will bandy with thee in faction; I will o’errun thee with policy; I will kill thee a hundred and fifty ways: therefore tremble, and depart.

—— Shakespeare, As You Like It, Act V, Scene I

They just don’t make threats like that any more.

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William Gibson’s Turkish publisher has come up with a clever new marketing scheme, to Mr. Gibson’s “considerable and enjoyably convoluted amusement”:

William Gibson’s Matrix Hunter

If even one Turkish kid reads and enjoys Neuromancer who otherwise wouldn’t, I think this is a good thing. It’s only right that Matrix fans learn the etymology of the name. And how many 20-year-old SF novels would hold up as well? My only complaint is that it’s not Molly there on the cover.

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According to Electrolite, the author of this weblog, and many of its readers, are only three degrees of separation from Salam Pax.

And anyone who’d read Philip K. Dick’s Man in the High Castle in the Baghdad Sheraton is a friend of mine.

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A strong case might have been made to go after Hussein just because he posed a potential threat to us and the region, because of his support for suicide bombers, and because of his ruthless oppression of his own people. But this is not the case our President chose to make.

...

I trusted Bush, and unless something big develops on the weapons front in Iraq soon, it appears as though I was fooled by him. Perhaps he himself was taken in by his intelligence and military advisers. If so, he ought to be angry as hell, because ultimately he bears the responsibility.

It suggests a strain of zealotry in this White House that regards the question of war as just another political debate. It isn’t. More than 100 fine Americans were killed in this conflict, dozens of British soldiers, and many thousands of Iraqis. Nobody gets killed or maimed in Capitol Hill maneuvers over spending plans, or battles over federal court appointments. War is a special case. It is the most serious step a nation can take, and it deserves the highest measure of seriousness and integrity.

—— Mark Bowden

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June 3, 2003

All right, so I played “chicken” with the airlines, and the airlines won — I was hoping that between falling petroleum prices and mounting airline bankruptcies something would happen to cut ticket prices, but it hasn’t worked out that way, and I can’t see how I can swing a trip to Europe just four weeks from now. So, with considerable regret, I’m punting on my plans to go wave the Union Jack at the World Kendo Championships in Glasgow.

That said, I’m feeling guilty enough about all the promises I made that I’d be out there this summer that I have to do something. And as it turns out, a ticket to London in the second week of October costs just about half as much as a ticket to London-and-Glasgow in the first week of July. I have now bought one, so I can’t weasel out of it this time. And that will be my birthday, so I’ll have an excuse.

I’m sorry to be missing the WKC, but I think this will actually be a better trip — less time in airports, more time to see people.

So look for me in Seven Dials in October, if you're there. And hopefully I can still get a couple of practices in — I have yet to miss a Monday night OUKC practice any time I’ve actually been in England.

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June 1, 2003

Dragged my corpus derelicti out of the house this evening long enough to see The Matrix: Reloaded. My expectations were already set by the mixed (and not-so-mixed) reviews; and the level at which they were set turned out to be just about right. So I wasn’t disappointed. But I wasn’t exactly captivated, either.

I’ll leave the plot alone. Even with all the Philosophy 101, the plot was still the best thing about the movie. Will Shetterly’s already dissected the pacing and the structure, so I won’t go into those, either.

So no spoilers, okay?

But:

Here’s the thing about The Matrix: Whatever you could say against The Matrix, it did have style.

Here’s the thing about Reloaded: It doesn’t.

Car chases, explosions... we’ve seen all that a hundred times — as the trailers for League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (talk about low expectations... but I digress) and Terminator 3 reminded us before the green katakana even started scrolling down the screen.

And the things we hadn’t seen before The Matrix, we’ve seen now; and The Matrix did it better. With the exception of a Bullet Time kick or two, Reloaded’s kung fu scenes and shootouts alike never reach the balletic grace of the first Matrix; nothing to match, let alone top, Neo’s training match with Morpheus, or Neo’s and Trinity’s slow-motion destruction of an entire SWAT team, impeccably choreographed and timed down to the chime of the elevator doors. Even on the fourth or fifth viewing, both of those scenes still send a chill down my spine, but today I got more of that from a split-second shot of two kids practicing kenjutsu in the preview for The Last Samurai than I did from Our Feature Presentation.

And then there’s the cinematography. That green patina that overlaid Thomas A. Anderson’s lowlife world, the grime of tenements and the dilapidation of half-abandoned shops and subway stations, the mid-70s cars, the whiff of circa-1980 depression and fatalism, the sense that nothing ever changes — all the things that subliminally suggested both the ugliness of the Matrix and the marginality of the ‘free’ humans’ existence in it — gone, replaced by a clean post-dot-com metropolis, packed with placements for Cadillac’s 2003 product line. If this is as bad as it gets, I’ll stick with the blue pill, thanks.

The tension between that verdigris demimonde and the shiny controlled world of the System — exemplified by the offices of Metacortex, the gleam of the cop’s mirrorshades (80s!), the polished marble of the lobby that Neo and Trinity demolish in that aforementioned slow-mo scene — not so much gone as diluted to meaninglessness by too many changes of scene and atmosphere, until we lose the ability to associate any of them with anything.

And as for Zion — I’m sorry, but I’ve seen better government, better spirituality, and better sensuality on Star Trek. That’s saying something, and it’s not saying anything good.

Don’t get me wrong; Reloaded is good summer fun, and it certainly has its moments (most of them involving either Hugo Weaving or Gloria Foster). But that’s the thing: it’s just summer fun. The Matrix was the cyberpunk aesthetic brought to life; by comparison, Reloaded is only an above-average action flick.

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Okay, if my digital thermometer’s to be trusted, it’s not SARS: my temperature’s two degrees low instead of two degrees high. But it still sucks. I should be writing, but instead I’m sitting around coughing, blowing my nose, playing video games and watching DVDs. And I’m going to have to go to work tomorrow, regardless.

But I got my contrib copy of Say... what time is it? yesterday. That was all right. Not only does it have good stuff in it, it looks good, too — a big hand to the Fortress of Words crew for design and art direction and editorial acumen.

Kelly Link blows the rest of us out of the water, of course. But that’s only to be expected.

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